Tom Hollander mistakenly sent huge ‘Avengers’ bonus meant for fellow British actor Tom Holland
By Amarachi Orie, CNN
(CNN) — British actor Tom Hollander knows all too well the trials and tribulations of being the almost-namesake of an incredibly famous fellow actor.
In an error to trump all errors, “The White Lotus” actor said he was once mistakenly sent Tom Holland’s first whopping seven-figure “Avengers” box office bonus.
On NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” show on Monday, host Meyers said to Hollander, “I feel like it’s almost the elephant in the room. There’s an actor named Tom Holland.”
“Oh yeah,” Hollander replied amid an uproar of audience laughter.
Meyers asked: “Do people ever make that error?”
To which, Hollander jokingly said, “Yes. It’s been very difficult. ‘Cause, you know, I was here first. But he’s enormously famous.”
While the pair do not look alike, Hollander said that “in non-visual contexts, I am mistaken for him all the time,” such as when talking to utility companies.
“‘And what’s your name?’ And they go, ‘Tom Holland?’ ‘Cause they’ve heard Tom Holland,” said Hollander, adding: “You go, ‘no it’s Tom Holland-er’.”
“Or I’m introduced to somebody’s very, very excited, then confused, then disappointed children,” he continued. “They go, ‘My children are so excited to meet you.’ And I go, ‘Are they though?’”
Hollander then illustrated what happens when he asks the parent to bring out their children, saying, “They come out and they go, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ And they go, ‘No. N-no.’”
Hollander went on to recall what happened when he was with the same agency as the “Spider-Man” star – “briefly,” he made sure to emphasize – and the people in the accounts department “got confused.”
He said he went to see a friend who was doing theater in England for £300 ($382) a week, and Hollander sat “smugly” in the audience having just done a BBC show for around £30,000 ($38,000).
However, Hollander recounted that, when he checked his inbox during the interval, “I got an email from my agency saying, ‘Payment advice slip: your first box-office bonus for ‘The Avengers.’
“And I thought, ‘I don’t think I’m in The Avengers.’ And it was an astonishing amount of money. And it was not his salary, it was his first box-office bonus, not the whole box office, the first one. And, it was more money than I’ve ever – it was a seven-figure sum.”
He added that Holland was “20 or something. So, my feeling of smugness, that you remember I had in the first half (of the play), disappeared very quickly. But that’s showbiz. It’s up, it’s down. It’s hero, it’s zero.”
Hollander will star as Truman Capote in the second season of Hulu’s “Feud” anthology series, “Capote Vs. The Swans,” available to stream from January 31.
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